I work at a Law Firm with about 30 employees. We have 10 Blackberries, mostly from Cingular with a couple from T-mobile.

Anyways, we had them all using the Cingular webclient for awhile, and I just had our Exchange 2000 Server forward a copy of each of their emails to their individual webclients. This all worked fine for awhile, but with the amount of spam these guys receive it was getting out of hand fast. They were filling up their 10mb quota in a day mostly with crap. Complaining either about their webclients needing to be cleared multiple times a day or just complaining in general about the spam. Filters wern't helping and there was no delay before the Exchange server forwarded their mail so it was sent off before our spam filters in the office could get ahold of it.

We switched a few of the people over to the Blackberry redirector, and just had it redirect the mail that was in their inbox (i.e. not the spam) to their blackberries.

Problem solved, or so I thought. Now I've started getting complaints from the people on the redirectors that they are unable to open attachments in emails that are sent to them. Our office scans all of the incoming mail and faxes into pdf documents that are then emailed to the recipients. I've tried explaining to them that the redirector doesn't support the converting of the attachments that the webclient did, and that if they'd like to have all of their spam back I'd be happy to switch them back. Never-the-less, their gripes go on, and they want me to find a solution to this problem.

So far this is all that I've come up with, please let me know if I'm not thinking of something, and what you would recommend:

Solution 1:Purchase a Blackberry Enterprise Server for the office with 5 licenses so that the whiners can get their attachments back and still not have to suffer the spam wrath.Pros: Well they're are too many to mention, the biggest being complete wireless Outlook synchronization including contacts, calendars, notes, etc... Cons: The price, this thing is so expensive, we'd have to purchase a new server, not to mention the software and the licenses. While the partners want a solution to this problem I don't think that getting attachments on your blackberry is really worth a $6000 dollar or so price tag.

Solution 2:External BES HostingPros: It's cheap, well cheaper than a BES server at least. For around $30 a month per Blackberry, I could get a hosted exchange account from mailstreet, that would work with attachments, and also provide the wireless outlook synchronization that the BES server would. Cons: I'm not sure if it would work with our domain at the office. Would I forward all of their mail to their mailstreet account, and let mailstreet work out the spam? Or would I completely replace their local outlook profile at the office with the mailstreet one, and if so how would I manage to keep them under the 200mb quota? These guys need to keep a lot of older emails, so I'm not sure if this would even be an option.

Solution 3:Some sort of Outlook rule that forwards emails with attachments to a blackberry webclient account so that they can be converted and then opened on the blackberry.Pros: It's free because they already have the webclient accounts, they are just not being used. Cons: I'm also not sure how this would work with emails that have other emails as attachments, also they would be getting multiple copies of the same emails which could seem strange.

That's all that I could really think of, is there anybody out that that is facing the same sort of thing that has some advice?

Mark Rejhon

05-03-2005 03:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lucky Luciano

While the partners want a solution to this problem I don't think that getting attachments on your blackberry is really worth a $6000 dollar or so price tag.

There's other benefits, such as full wireless synchronization of the whole PIM as well as other security features, and some remote administration features.

Mark Rejhon

05-03-2005 03:51 PM

Quote:

Or would I completely replace their local outlook profile at the office with the mailstreet one

This is correct. If you get a hosted BES account, you have to replace the Outlook profile with the one provided by the hosted service.

hughvh

05-03-2005 04:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lucky Luciano

Solution 1:Purchase a Blackberry Enterprise Server for the office with 5 licenses so that the whiners can get their attachments back and still not have to suffer the spam wrath.

Cons: The price, this thing is so expensive, we'd have to purchase a new server, not to mention the software and the licenses. While the partners want a solution to this problem I don't think that getting attachments on your blackberry is really worth a $6000 dollar or so price tag.

I'm not a BES admin, but IIRC you can run a BES on same box as your Exchange Server.

If you go the hosted solution, I suggest setup it up on a second level domain for mailstreet's service. For example mailstreet.xyzcompany.com. This should make network administration and troubleshooting easier.

corey@12mile

05-03-2005 04:51 PM

Why don't you just use IMF? crank it down a little tighter than default, subscribe to a couple of realtime blacklists and eliminate the spam, way cheaper in the end...

IMF... free (from MS even)
RBL subs... $20 a month or so

Stop looking for a workaround and eliminate the source of the problem... My exchange server IMF filters out thousands of junk mail items everyday... If 1-2 make it to my handheld per day I am suprised...

cd.

Lucky Luciano

05-03-2005 06:00 PM

I believe that I mentioned that we already have a spam solution in the office. Because we are a law firm and can't afford to miss any messages that might be mistaken for spam, we have our spam messages go into a seperate folder within the users mailboxes. IMF and a Blacklist wouldn't help at all. The spam isn't the problem, it's the attachments, with the blackberry redirectors you can specify for it to only move messages from the inbox to the blackberry. When it's set to forward to the webclient, it forwards all messages regardless of what folder they are put in.